Yesterday, we were treated to another preliminary injunction on a product due to patent trolling. Over the past few years, some companies have resorted to patent trolling instead of competing on merit, using frivolous and obvious software and design patents to block competitors - even though this obviously shouldn't be legal. The fact that this is, in fact, legal, is baffling, and up until a few months ago, a regular topic here on OSNews. At some point - I stopped reporting on the matter. The reason for this is simple: I realised that intellectual property law exists outside of regular democratic processes and is, in fact, wholly and utterly totalitarian. What's the point in reporting on something we can't change via legal means?

Not to tout my own horn but I just recently made a service where you can donate money DIRECTLY to any artist, bypassing the record labels, distributors, managers and lawyers. It's on my website.

Great idea! I had a look at the page and I liked what I saw, except for the little disheartening "What to do if the transaction fails" combo box. Can you show us some statistics about how many of the donations are successful? How do you send the donations to the artists? Do you contact them one by one?

Just launched so there hasn't been any donations yet. In fact this thread is my first mention of it.

The idea is that I will contact the artist myself and if they accept the money I will add them to the system and have all subsequent transactions be automatic. If they decline the money, are dead, have split up, or I just can't find the artist I will mark him/her/them as such so people can't continue to send money to that artist.

The reason why I don't contact the artists beforehand is because

a) I don't really have anything to show them when I approach them, they don't know me, my website, anything. This way I can contact them and say "Hi, your fans have sent you $X to show you support. This is the service I made that they used to support you. Do you accept the money?"
b) Before I have enough artists signed up the service will be pretty much useless
c) I can't find all the smaller indie artists and to be honest I think this service is more for them than for the big and already established artists

I am thinking of adding a sort of FAQ where I explain everything in a little more depth. Also, I should mention the laws I have to follow, where to send complaints (both to me and the supervising governmental body here in Sweden), what rights you as a donor has (for example you can regret the donation for 14 days) and so on.